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Megavideo breaks into comScore's Top 10 video sites

10.03.2009
YouTube has surpassed 100 million U.S. viewers, but the latest comScore report on online video has a more surprising stat: Megavideo, a YouTube-like site with entire TV shows ripped from cable TV, is now in comScore's Top 10 most-watched list, booting ESPN off the list and sneaking up on Disney and AOL with over 100 million viewings in January.

Part of Megavideo's appeal is the availability of entire TV show episodes. I've been using Megavideo to catch up on David Duchovny in season 2 of Showtime's Californication. Showtime hasn't given me a way to buy a DVD or a download of the second season, which ended months ago.

The ripped episodes uploaded to Megavideo aren't high-resolution, but the entire episode plays immediately and without sputtering. Why bother with BitTorrent?

Megavideo has plenty of non-copyright-infringing clips, like this scary Turkish train accident. But this complete 22-minute episode of the Japanese cartoon One Piece has been watched nearly a million times.

One mathematical caveat: ComScore's Top 10 chart makes clear that while #1 YouTube accounts for 43 percent of online video watching, #10 Megavideo only accounts for 0.7 percent. Through YouTube, Google's dominance over video traffic is catching up to its dominance in search.